Larry Page

Lawrence “Larry” Page, born March 26, 1973 is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who is the co-founder of Google, alongside Sergey Brin. As of 2013, Page’s personal wealth is estimated to be $23 billion (US), ranking him #20 on the Forbes 400 list of the 400 richest Americans.

Page is the inventor of PageRank, the foundation of Google’s search ranking algorithm, and he and Brin own approximately 16 percent of Google’s stock.

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. His father, Carl Page, earned a PhD in computer science in 1965, when the field was being established, and is considered a “pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence.” Both he and Page’s mother, Gloria, were computer science professors at Michigan State University.

After enrolling in a computer science PhD program at Stanford University, Page was in search of a dissertation theme and considered exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.

As a research project at Stanford University, Page met Sergey Brin and together, they created a search engine that listed results according to the popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would often be the most useful. They called the search engine Google after the mathematical term “Googol,” which is a 1 followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Web.

Brin and Page met in March 1995 during a spring orientation of new PhD candidates. Brin, who had already been in the program for two years, was assigned to show some students, including Page, around campus, and they later became friends.

After raising $1 million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company in 1998. Google has since become the world’s most popular search engine, receiving more than 200 million queries each day. Both Page and Brin earn an annual compensation of one dollar, although both are Multi-Billionaires.

Larry Page saw the company through the $50 billion revenue milestone in 2012. The stock rose nearly 30% in the past year, adding more than $4 billion to Page’s net worth

Page married Lucinda Southworth at Richard Branson’s Caribbean island Necker Island in 2007. Southworth is a research scientist, and the sister of actress and model Carrie Southworth. As of November 2009, Page and Southworth are parents of one son.